The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology. A common network architecture used for a private network to access the Internet is to use a router with standalone or built-in network address translation (NAT) functionality to translate between internal network addresses and shared network addresses.